18 December 2006

Don't diet--concentrate your story

I've been pondering Betsy's excellent comments of Dec. 13 as I work on a short SF story myself. She said to 'Put your story on a diet'. I agree with the intent of this comment, but IMHO the wording is imprecise. You don't want to just make your story shorter. You need to cut out all the non-vital parts to concentrate or distill the story. Leave ONLY the essence of the story, lose the extra bits.

For example, the short I'm working on involves a woman who uses the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics to save her family. When I wrote it originally I included this whole thing with Homeland Security (HS). After pondering it for a while, I realized the problem with the story was the HS part was totally superfluous. So, it's back to work for me!